孟郊诗
Poems of Meng Jiao
Index
路病
Sick on the Road
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病客无主人 艰哉求卧难 飞光赤道路 内火焦肺肝 |
Sick traveler without a master, Ah, it's painful even to lie down. The light along the road turns red, As fever torments my inmost thoughts. |
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欲饮井泉竭 欲医囊用单 稚颜能几日 壮志忽已残 |
I need a drink. The well is dry. I need medicine. My purse is empty. How long will I go on like a child? My strong will has abandoned me. |
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人子不言苦 归书但云安 愁环在我肠 宛转终无端 |
A man shouldn't talk about his hardships. I'd read or write. But the clouds are so peaceful. A ring of worries encircles my heart, Winding about until I uselessly die. |
-- 孟郊
废话
I'd say this poem comes from later in Meng Jiao's wanderings. He seems older. But he still has a kind of self-pity that you never find in Bai Juyi. I think that, inside, he is always younger than the eternally young Bai Juyi was. Which must have been hard. Their ideals seem to be similar. But where Bai Juyi was always a young man inside, Meng Jiao seems like an older child at heart. I imagine, from what he has shown us, that he was a fairly rugged individual, far more so than Bai Juyi. He's not as childish and as self-absorbed as some professional climbers I have known. His heart is too big for that. But part of his burden is his not growing up. I think it a sound supposition that he really did not want to be whatever his father had been to him. I don't mean that as an explanation. But I think that it is a vector in the complicated essence of what Meng Jiao was.